Congratulations to Professor Alain Aspect for the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics

We are elated to learn that Professor Alain Aspect has shared this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics with John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger, “for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science.”

Professor Aspect has strong ties with the Department of Physics. “He has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Physics since 2018 and has visited CityU numerous times,” said Professor Xun-Li Wang, Head of the Department of Physics. In 2018, Professor Aspect gave a short course on Laser Science which drew a full house of students and faculty members from Hong Kong and nearby regions in mainland China.

Professor Aspect is also a Senior Fellow at Hong Kong Institute for Advanced Studies (HKIAS) at CityU. In 2018, he was conferred an Honorary Doctor of Science by CityU in recognition of his significant contributions to education and society.

Many of our faculty members enjoyed enormously meeting with Professor Aspect.

“We learned so much from Prof. Aspect. The question he has addressed, on the locality and causality, is one of the most fundamental questions in physics and perhaps in all sciences.” said Sunny Wang, Associate Head and Associate Professor in the department, “Not only is he such an eminent scholar, he also cares about the society. Just like a photon, he always builds bridges between people.”

Prof. Jeff Zhe-yu Ou, Chair Professor of Physics, commented, “What is even more amazing is that Professor Aspect’s award-winning work was done during his Ph.D. study by himself with the help of two junior graduate students. The topic in that time, which concerns the debate between the great Einstein and Bohr, was so fundamental and so hard that few professors were willing or perhaps able to advise a student to go in that direction. Professor Aspect’s work, for the first time, closed one of the loopholes in the great debate between Einstein and Bohr, bringing the attention of physicists all over the world to the bizarre and ghostly phenomena of quantum entanglement.”

“Apart from his revolutionary work on the Bell inequality for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize this year, he has carried out several other ground-breaking experiments using Bose-Einstein condensates,” said Dr. Xiao Li, an Assistant Professor in the department. “For example, he finished a seminal work in 2008 demonstrating the famous Anderson localization phenomenon in a Bose-Einstein condensate. This was the first time Anderson localization was demonstrated using matter waves, which paved the way for the subsequent experimental investigations of many-body localization and other quantum non-ergodicity phenomenon using ultracold atoms. The depth and breadth of Prof. Aspect’s works are just breath-taking.”

“Professor Aspect is also a great teacher and would always find times to interact with our students during his visits,’ said Prof. Sai Tak Chu, Professor of Physics, who helped organize the short course on laser science.

“We are truly honoured to have Professor Aspect as a member of CityU’s physics community, and we could not be happier when the Nobel announcement came out,” Professor Wang added.

The Department of Physics sends our heartfelt congratulations to Professor Aspect.